Making the Implicit Explicit: Rigorous Inquiry & the Art of Reaching Understudied Populations

Both racial/ethnic & religious minority populations increased in the United States after the 1965 immigration reforms. In the 1960s & 1970s, there was a considerable increase in the overall population of Muslims due to immigration from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and due to conversions among African Americans to mainstream Islam. In recent years, the Muslim population within the United States has increased according to some estimates to between six & ten million, largely due to continued migration of Muslim immigrants and refugees, natural births, and due to conversion.

While some research on Muslims is available, social work research has not kept pace with their growing population and the increasing complexity of factors impacting their psychosocial well-being. Hodge et al. (2021) conducted a 10-year content analysis of social work periodicals, focusing particularly on articles mentioning an Islamic perspective or featuring Muslims. The authors reported that Muslims and the Islamic perspective were included in only about 0.19 percent of the over 3,700 articles covering religion and spirituality. Haddad (1991) noted in the early 1990s that Muslims in the US were underrepresented in research partly due to their unfamiliarity with being subjects of research, partly due to apprehension in sharing personal/familial details with researchers, and partly due to their experiences with repressive governments in their countries of origin, fearing that information they shared during the research could in turn be shared with government authorities. There is recently an increasing comfort among Muslims with participation in research but challenges persist.

This roundtable is intended to initiate a dialog especially about engaging minority youth populations in social work research, relying on the experiences of the four panelists in researching Muslims in the US. Two of the panelists are full professors in schools of social work, who will provide an overview of the research landscape as it relates to the development and validation of research instruments to study Muslims and to strategies to promote recruitment of diverse Muslim populations within the US. Another two panelists, an Associate Professor in a school of social work, and the other, a social work doctoral student, have recently concluded a study which utilizes a community-based, ecological systems framework to examine factors impacting faith trends among Muslim youth. They will elaborate on the art of reaching these understudied youth, especially in the midst of heightened anti-Islamic bigotry in the social environment. They will share how they still managed to recruit over 600 Muslim youth along with a subset of parents, and share some of the preliminary findings. Attendees of the roundtable will be encouraged to join the conversation, to ask those questions which give them pause as they consider reaching understudied populations, and to share their own experiences and best practices related to research on minority populations. Our goal is to promote collaboration between the panelists and attendees in our common interest in elevating the state of the art of research and scholarship of understudied minority populations.